DIY July 23, 2020

How to E-Design a Room Layout without Photoshop

Designing or redesigning a room can be stressful. It takes a lot of thought and time to find pieces that work well together in your space.

I am a very visual person, and one thing that has helped is creating a mock up of the room layout online before buying furniture.

This process can be done in four easy steps, and is actually a lot of fun.

Find the furniture/decor pieces
Download and open Paint 3D
Clean up the image
Upload and design in Canva

Find the Furniture and Decor Pieces You Want to Consider

The hardest part to all of this is finding the pieces you are considering buying in the first place. If you are struggling with this, I suggest reading the following posts:

The Reason You are Not Finding Good Home Deals

How to Style Your Living Room on a Budget

5 Websites for Affordable Furniture

Once you find something you are considering purchasing, right click the image to copy image or save the image.

Download and Open Paint 3D

(Note: if you have Canva Pro you can skip this step, Canva Pro has a background remover feature that works amazing!)

Next make sure you have Paint 3D installed to your computer. This is a free program that works really well.

Once you open it up, paste the image into the program.

Clean Up the Image

Now that you have your furniture image in the program click on “magic select” and crop the image so that it is tightly framing the piece of furniture.

From there hit “next” and it should keep the piece of furniture highlighted. If there are spots it missed, you can manually add or remove them from the selection.

Once you are happy with what is selected, hit “done”

This will separate the furniture from the background.

From there you can delete the background so that the furniture is on a solid white background.

Now you will save as, making sure to click “transparency” as you save.

Design the Room Layout in Canva

From here I suggest using Canva to upload all of the furniture images you have saved in order to design the entire room

Canva is free and more user friendly than a lot of other programs out there.

You can either open up a blank background or you can take a photo of the space you are working with to place to images of the furniture on top of.

From there you can play around with different pieces of decor or furniture that you have found.

Using Paint 3D to isolate the piece of furniture onto a transparent background should be a helpful tool in the planning process

It will not look perfect, but it should still give you a good idea of what you have and what you are working with.

Above is an example of how I used a real image of a room and put furniture images on top of it

I am still shopping for the two end tables.

You Now Have a Customized and Cohesive Room Layout

The process of making a room layout should take a lot of the guess work out of buying new furniture and help you to design your room.

If you need ideas of where to find furniture you can check out my blog post titled 5 Websites for Affordable Furniture without Sacrificing Style

I also recommend looking at my post How to Style Your Living Room on a Budget where I explain how I picked out furniture for the room and used this e-design to style it.

Have you ever designed a room like this before buying furniture? Let me know.